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The Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences started in 1999, with funding from the University Initiatives Fund. It is the first center in the nation devoted to this interface, with the triple mission of galvanizing collaborative research between social scientists and statisticians, developing a menu of new graduate courses for social science students, and putting together an innovative case-based undergraduate statistics sequence for the social sciences.

Research collaboration is fostered in a variety of ways, through seminars, seed grants, the consulting program, the working papers series, and the collaborative work of our core faculty. Our dynamic Seminar series meets on Wednesdays at 12:30pm in Denny 401 and is run by CSSS Seminar Director Adrian Dobra. This features a great deal of interaction and discussion, and is highly interdisciplinary in terms of both speakers and audience. An innovation this year is the presentation of "Primers": seminars that introduce topics in a gentle way. The first two Primers were on Game Theory and Instrumental Variables.

Seed grants have been awarded to jump start 20 outstanding, mostly interdisciplinary projects featuring teams of investigators from Biostatistics, Demography, Economics, Linguistics, Political Science, Sociology, Statistics, and Microsoft Research. Several of these have already led to funded research grants from federal agencies.

The Statistical Consulting Service for the Social Sciences has been helping clients from across the social sciences on campus and beyond, including the State's HEC Board and United Way. It is run by CSSS Consulting Director Elena Erosheva ; please take advantage of this opportunity. Eighty-five working papers have now been published, and further submissions are invited.

This year, CSSS is offering a rich menu of graduate courses in quantitative methods for social science students. These include loglinear modeling and logistic regression, applied regression, event history analysis, social network analysis, sample survey methods, Bayesian statistics for the social sciences, and causal modeling, as well as a review of mathematics for social scientists. Three Ph.D. specializations are available based on CSSS courses; one in each of the Political Science, Sociology and Statistics departments. This year for the first time we have also offered a Math Camp for social science graduate students.

At the undergraduate level, CSSS offers a sequence of courses on statistical methods for the social sciences (CS&SS 320, CS&SS 321). This is taught in a case-based way, a radical departure from the traditional first statistics course.

This is all made possible by the CSSS core faculty and CSSS faculty affiliates. CSSS core faculty have recently achieved considerable national and international recognition. CSSS Director Adrian Raftery was elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Recently Adrian was ranked as the world's most cited mathematical scientist during the period 1995-2005 by the Institute for Scientific Information. Associate Director Ross Matsueda was recently elected a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology. Mark S. Handcock and Martina Morris were awarded the Richard A. Lester Prize for the Outstanding Book in Labor Economics and Industrial Relations published in 2001 for their book Divergent Paths. And Peter Hoff won the Leondard J. Savage Award for the best dissertation in Bayesian statistics.

Elena Erosheva joined the core faculty with a joint appointment in Statistics and Social Work, the first such appointment in the nation. This opens up exciting possibilities for collaboration between these two disciplines. Sibel Sirakaya joined the faculty with a joint appointment in Statistics and Economics, and is interested in computational economics and statistical modeling for applied microeconomics. Christopher Adolph joined the CSSS core faculty with a joint appointment in Political Science and Statistics, and his work focuses on a comparative political economy, quantitative methods, and the visualization of data. Adrian Dobra has recently joined the CSSS core faculty with a joint appointment in Statistics and also Biobehavioral Nursing and Health Systems. His research interests are in statistical modelling and statistical genomics.

Contact Information

Nick Ganoulis,
Administrator,
Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences,
Box 354320,
Padelford Hall, C 23
University of Washington,
Seattle, WA 98195-4320

Office Phone: (206) 616 6235
Fax: (206) 221 6873
email: csss@u.washington.edu